Last year in Australia there was an agreement amongst a number of parties, led by the Australian Department of Health, for the results of diagnostic tests to be sent to the national electronic health record system for accessing by both care providers and the individuals for whom the tests were performed. The current proposal to […]

My spin detector spun into the red zone last week following an article posted on a well known commentary web site in the Australian e-health space. The article opened with:- “As the adoption of the personal e-health record (PCEHR) in Australia starts to snowball, we are likely to see fewer medication errors and improved diagnostic and […]

Healthbase Australia has updated the online Australian Medicines Terminology browser to include the 2.27 version of the AMT  released by NEHTA recently. All deprecated versions are still available for browsing/searching. I can only assume that no-one else in Australia is regularly incorporating the monthly AMT releases into an application. After all this time, the download […]

Australia is poised to produce a system of Personally Controlled Electronic Health Records (PCEHRs) from July 2012, some 6 months from now. According to the recently published Concept of Operations, each person’s PCEHR will comprise a set of electronic documents, the majority of which are to be based on HL7’s Clinical Document Architecture (CDA), in […]

During the Health Informatics Conference in Brisbane in August 2011, the CEO of Australia’s National E-health Transition Authority, Peter Fleming, likened building the  national system of Personally Controlled Electronic Health Records (PCEHR) to putting a man on the moon.Well let’s examine where we are at the end of 2011, with 6 months to go to […]

Healthbase Australia has updated the online Australian Medicines Terminology browser to include the 2.26 version of the AMT  released by NEHTA today. All deprecated versions are still available for browsing/searching. I can only assume that no-one else in Australia is regularly incorporating the monthly AMT releases into an application. After all this time, the download […]

Healthbase Australia has updated the online Australian Medicines Terminology browser to include the 2.25 version of the AMT recently released by NEHTA. All deprecated versions are still available for browsing/searching. I can only assume that no-one else in Australia is regularly incorporating the monthly AMT releases into an application. After all this time, the download process […]

I have, on a number of occasions over the past decade,  tried to explain the importance of building software, systems, national infrastructure, etc. on the right foundations. Other people who do this in the e-health arena often talk purely about the importance of standards and the analogy with the ‘rail gauge problem’ experienced in Australia […]

Well, it’s just a little over 14 months till the launch of Australia’s Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR). And we have already seen two ‘waves’ of grant funded ‘implementations’ announced by Health Minister Nicola Roxon. The PCEHR draft ‘Concept of Operations‘ was released publicly on the 12th of April and  organisations and individuals have until […]

It is now almost 5 years since the Australian Government launched its 2006 e-Government Strategy, Responsive Government: A New Service Agenda, and over a year since the “Engage: Getting on with Government 2.0″ Report of the Government 2.0 Taskforce was handed down. It seems that many government departments and agencies involved in e-health have deliberately side-stepped […]